Last Friday I have attended Sitecore XP 8 Upgrade for .NET Developers training in their London office. Unlike WND (4-days-long) training, to attend this 1-day-long UPG (upgrade) course, you have to already have one of previous full development certification courses done in past.

My major purpose for that training was to get clear understanding about both internals and integration of xDB with the rest of platform, mostly due to the big number of questions I prepared well in advance. I got everything what expected from that day!

There were only 4 trainees in the class; instructor was a guy who works for head office in Copenhagen - Alin Pârjolea - I knew him from community activity previously. Alin was just a bit shy in the beginning, admitting that is was his first time training to such an advanced auditory, but he did well and in an hour we found ourselves very involved in progressing the course and had nice engrossing conversations every break time.

Certification exam itself was typical - 40 questions from which you need to get 70% of correct answers, three options one and only of them is correct. However I found it to be quite complex. Many questions were worded quite confusingly - and the answers also were not quite easy to select from, sometimes we had two answers suiting question, sometimes none, so had to try to read between the lines and try thinking an questioner - what in fact was intended to ask. Also questions were from the whole Sitecore experience, not only what was covered by the upgrade course that day, so those who have little experience in general and little knowledge of best practices are very unlikely to pass that test. All four of us were quite experienced Sitecore developers and all four have passed, I personally got 82% of correct answers.

Also after the course Alin shared with us some best solutions already existing, that was how I knew about Sitecore Habitat - probably the best approach to moduleness, simplicity and extensibility for big and multisite Sitecore solutions.

So, I am quite glad I managed to get certified with Sitecore 8 and do recommend as well!